Leviticus 15:18

Summary

The verse addresses a woman with whom a man has had sexual intercourse involving emission of semen. Following this act, both parties must wash with water, and both remain ritually unclean until evening.

Key words

• shikhvat ("a laying of", H7902) — feminine singular construct noun, forming a construct chain with the following word; literally "a lying down of," used idiomatically for sexual emission.
• zara ("seed", H2233I) — masculine singular noun completing the construct phrase shikhvat-zara, "an emission of seed," the technical expression for seminal emission.
• rachatzu ("they will wash", H7364) — qal sequential perfect, third person plural; the plural form indicates that more than one party performs the washing, even though only "a man" and "a woman" were named individually in the preceding clause.
• tam'u ("they will be unclean", H2930A) — qal sequential perfect, third person plural; continues the narrative sequence begun by rachatzu, marking the resulting state of impurity as shared.
• 'ad ("until", H5704) — preposition governing ha-'arev ("the evening", H6153), setting the temporal boundary of the impurity.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with ve-ishah ("and a woman", H9002 + H0802G) as its subject, followed by a relative clause introduced by 'asher ("whom", H0834A): "whom a man will lie with" (yishkav ish otah). The event described is specified by the construct phrase shikhvat-zara, literally "a lying down of seed," which functions as an adverbial or appositional qualifier clarifying that the intercourse in question involves seminal emission. This noun phrase, rather than a separate verb, carries the semantic weight of "ejaculation."

The two following verbs, rachatzu ("they will wash") and tam'u ("they will be unclean"), are grammatically plural, even though the sentence has only introduced singular subjects (ishah, ish). This plural agreement signals that the consequence described—washing and impurity—applies jointly to both the man and the woman named in the earlier clause, despite the singular grammatical subject of the opening noun phrase. The sequential perfect form (ve- + perfect) used for both verbs chains them as consequences following logically and temporally from the initial act, a common construction for legal or procedural sequences in this text. The impurity is bounded temporally by 'ad ha-'arev ("until the evening"), fixing its duration to the remainder of the day.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the final verbs in the singular — lavabitur ("she will wash") and immunda erit ("she will be unclean") — applying the washing and impurity explicitly to the woman alone. The Hebrew, by contrast, uses plural verb forms (rachatzu, tam'u), and the LXX likewise uses a plural form, λούσονται ("they will wash"), matching the Hebrew's inclusion of both parties in the resulting state of impurity.